I Lost My Spam Virginity

Today is a very special day. For today I am no longer a boy; I am now a man, with all of a man's strengths and weaknesses. I, ladies and gentlemen, received spam.

They left no return address. 

What makes this spam so special is its rather cryptic message, which took some time to translate. Witness the most confusing paragraph in the history of the English language:

You're Next: The Next Big Slasher?

Movie recommendations are a tricky business; you're always destined for either cinematic greatness and a safe spot on your favourites list or crushing disappointment and a lingering resentment of the recommender for wasting an evening of your life and a nice five pound bottle of plonk.

The whole thing just compounds itself when Cocaine Friday is on the line.

 It was my driving instructor of all people who directed me to watch You're Next, the 2011 home invasion slasher that finally got a release late in 2013, and having heard good things from other sources as well I was quite hopeful for this one. The home invasion sub-genre has seen a resurgence in resent years, something I'm sure someone much smarter than I could use to glean a mystical insight into society, but as with any rise in popularity the quality of the large majority of export most assuredly goes down. The last good one I saw was the gruesome French nightmare fuel that is Inside over a year ago, and even that had its fair share of flaws.

If you're going to perform a caesarian, you might as well do it correctly.

The problem is that the genre has been cut a little too carefully from the cloth during its conception, making it exceptionally difficult to create a film that feels original and engaging without having to resort to a overly gruesome gimmick (see above) to keep the audience interested. And if there has ever been a better example of the sample that all of the others could be held up against to see if they matched the carpet (once you have an analogy, always run with it no matter what), then You're Next is it. Don't get excited folks, that's not as much of a compliment as it sounds.

Film Facts 2: Gravity Capsule

Gravity was pretty good, wasn't it? Yeah, it's pretty much unanimous that it was a great film, with some stellar (eh, eh?!) acting from Sandra "Hyperventilating" Bullock and George Clooney and very pretty CGI and sound editing; I'll be gobsmacked if it doesn't pick up this year's Academy Award for visual effects, which it's apparently already in the finalists for. Since we all already know Gravity is good, I thought I'd skip the whole reviewing thing and focus on some of the logistics of the movie. Heads up to those of you that still think Hollywood has the balls to hire someone like Sandra Bullock and kill her off, because I'm going to spoil the ending for you. Around about...now.

Space never looked so dirty.

She lives. Shock, horror. But, frankly, that's hardly the point of the film and if this truly ground-breaking revelation is going to detract from your enjoyment the I shall gleefully direct you to this Cracked article (which is, obviously, gospel) that says you apparently enjoy things more when you already know the end. So mneh.

Meet The List

If there's one thing I should really get round to doing it's writing these posts more than two days in advance, because as soon as anything gets in the way of my writing, then all shit goes to hell or something similar.

However all dogs do definitely go to heaven.

The person that I'm going to use as a scapegoat for my not finishing off the long awaited Film Facts Part 2: The Factening, is Gabe Newell. He founded Valve. Valve runs Steam. Steam has sales. The Steam Christmas Sale had FTL: Faster Than Light on it for under a pound. And now I can't stop playing it.

Upgrade screens: The crystal meth of video games.

This along with my constant tweaking of the blog layout, as you can see by it's now greatly improved sexy sexiness (it's so sexy), and the creation of an unhealthy number of favicons that I intend to cycle through has led to a certain downtime in my usually industrious writing escapades. It's not that I'm saying I was distracted by pretty shiny things but yes, I was. Also by the agonising frustration of being lasered to death by fucking drones for the 60th time. Hours of epic battle followed by my poor spaceship being laser-raped by robots really sucks the time out of your day.

Top 5 "Oo, That Looks Good" Movies of 2014

The new year has arrived at long last; we only had to wait 365 days or so for it. And with the new year comes the long wait for the inevitable wave of summer blockbusters that arrive every June with the timing and grace of only the most punctual and voluminous menstrual sloughs.

There is never not a good moment to use this image.

Summer this year seems to be set to flood us like so much body-temperature uterus lining with a veritable smorgasbord of exactly the same movies over and over again. With lots of lasers and jumping and looking seriously into the distance, sci-fi and alien invasion seem to be the aim of the game, so be prepared for, well, lots of sci-fi and aliens; along with the obligatory kids animated movie sequels and another superhero movie, because we're totally not tired of them yet. Yay.

Why can't we all just wait patiently for Ant-Man?

That said, there's still plenty to be excited all through the year so, without further ado (or adon't), I give you my top 5 list of movies that, as the title suggests, make you lean over to your mate in the cinema and shout-whisper, "Dude, we need to see that." Let us begin with: